The Log Cabin Republicans, once a respected part of the LGBTQ movement that was instrumental in overturning Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, has declared “the struggle for gay rights in America is largely over.”
The organization, taken over by Donald Trump supporters in recent years, announced they will shift their focus to include the Middle East while the Republican Party blocks landmark civil rights legislation for LGBTQ people.
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The group paints the fight for LGBTQ rights as a partisan issue, despite their decades of lobbying and activism in the Republican party. They accuse LGBTQ civil rights organizations of being nothing more than a fundraising arm of the Democratic Party. To solve the problem, they say, they’ll start highlighting the anti-LGBTQ policies in predominantly Muslim countries that the former president targeted for vitriol like Iran and Afghanistan.
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By pinpointing their publicity campaign on those two countries, it allows the group to decry blatant anti-LGBTQ discrimination and violence while avoiding their own culpability in America’s issues. The disastrous withdrawal of American forces from Afghanistan that happened under President Joe Biden’s administration, despite being ordered by then-President Trump, allows the group to continue to beat an anti-Biden drum while masquerading as concern for brown people halfway around the world while continuing to decry anti-racism initiatives at home.
Trump targeted Iran for particular vitriol, joined by Ric Grenell, the out former U.S. Ambassador to Germany, who announced he would lead an effort to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide at Trump’s urging. Asked about it by reporters, Trump said he didn’t know anything about it. Any unspecified effort was unsuccessful, but Republicans have made Iran into the bogeyman for anti-LGBTQ violence.
“We both know that the struggle for gay rights in America is largely over,” Chadwick Moore, the group’s “Editor-In-Chief” for their blog, wrote in an email to supporters. “Yet the Left-wing organizations that make up Gay, Inc. continue to stoke imaginary boogeymen in the American LGBT community to build their email lists and bankroll their voter outreach work for Democrats.”
“There is real oppression in the world, but it isn’t here in America. Homosexuality is still a crime in dozens of countries. In nine, you can be put to death. Yet the supposedly-LGBT advocacy groups like the Human Rights Campaign, along with their powerful corporate and media allies, are silent.”
The group continues by castigating companies who purport to support LGBTQ rights but do business in anti-LGBTQ countries. The complaint has been common in left-wing circles for decades and is usually downplayed by Republicans as “censorship” or “cancel culture.”
“One thing we hear over and over from sources in the Middle East is that the gay West doesn’t care about them. So, as Gay, Inc. continues to prioritize Manhattan and West Hollywood, the Log Cabin Republicans have decided to take the fight to Riyadh and Tehran,” the group declared shortly before hosting a gala fundraiser at Trump’s Mar-A-Lago estate.
To prove how serious they are about helping LGBTQ people outside of the United States, they breathlessly announced they’ve started a new blog to repeat stories previously reported by the mass media and LGBTQ outlets worldwide – like the peril of LGBTQ people under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.
“We’ve assembled a team of LGBTQ+ citizen journalists in Tehran, Kabul, Beirut, and around the world to tell human stories about the realities of being gay in the regions that the woke liberals and corporations have left behind,” they crowed. “This latest project is a game-changer, both for the millions of LGBT people persecuted around the world and for the woke corporations who pretend to care about them.”
The crack team of journalists did not include any quotes from persecuted LGBTQ people on how a political group’s blog would be “a game-changer” for millions of people who could care less that a small group of gay men want to use them to score political points.
